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The son of Jozef Israëls, one of the most respected painters of the Hague School, and Aleida Schaap, Isaac Israëls displayed precocious artistic talent from an early age.

Between 1880 and 1882 he studied at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, where he met George Hendrik Breitner who was to become a lifelong friend. In 1881, when he was 16, he sold a painting, Bugle Practice, even before it was finished to the artist and collector Hendrik Willem Mesdag.[3] Two portraits he made in the same year of his grandmother and a family friend, Nannette Enthoven (below), attest the technical ability he had attained by that age.[4][5] Starting 1878, Israëls made annual visits to the Salon des Artistes Français with his father and in 1882 made his debut there with Military Burial.[6] In the 1885 Salon he received an honourable mention for his Transport of Colonial Soldiers.[7][8] At this time he was reading Émile Zola,[9] as was Breitner, and following his triumph at the Salon he spent a year travelling in the Belgian mining districts and elsewhere.

Beginning 1886, Israëls lived in Amsterdam and registered with Breitner at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts to complete his schooling. Both of them, however, quickly abandoned the academy for the more progressive circle of the Tachtigers, an influential group of writers and artists of the time. This was a group that insisted style must reflect content and that emotionally charged subjects can only be represented by an equally intense technique. Influenced by this philosophy, Israëls became a painter of the streets, cafes, and cabarets of Amsterdam. At this time he met the Dutch engraver and painter Willem de Zwart who also became a lifelong friend.

He often spent his summers with his father in the Dutch seaside resort of Scheveningen near The Hague. Guests included Édouard Manet and Max Liebermann. Interested by the changing light of sun and sea, he painted many colourful seaside scenes.

Towards the end of the century, Israëls was introduced by his childhood friend and portrait painter Thérèse Schwartze to the Amsterdam fashion house Hirsch (fashion) (nl) at the Leidseplein. Israëls portrayed the whole range of the world of haute couture, from wealthy clients to toiling seamstresses, gaining access even to the dressing-rooms.

At the outbreak of the First World War he was living in London, where he found new subjects in horse-riding at Rotten Row and in ballerinas and boxers. He returned to Holland for the duration of the war, living alternately in The Hague, Amsterdam and Scheveningen, where he worked primarily as a portrait painter. Amongst his sitters was Magaretha Gertrud Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, executed as a spy in France in 1917. Her portrait can be seen at the Kröller-Müller Museum. Other sitters included Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and the feminist physician Aletta Jacobs, although he also portrayed ordinary subjects such as girls in the street and telephone operators.

On 26 April 2005, one of his Donkey riding on the Beach series realised €482,400 at Christie's, Amsterdam. The sale example[12] was almost identical to the one in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (below),[13] but larger and a little more delicate in tone.[14][15]

^Around 1917 Israëls borrowed a version of van Gogh's Sunflowers (the version now in the National Gallery, London) from Jo Bonger and used it as a backdrop for several of his portraits, of which this example and Homage to Van Gogh (Blue Blouse) are the best known. Isaac's father Josef was an important influence on van Gogh.